I am a published author of books about film - over a dozen to my name, the latest being "When Women Ruled Hollywood." As the title of the blog suggests, this is a site devoted to movies of the 1960s but since I go to the movies twice a week - an old-fashioned double-bill of my own choosing - I might occasionally slip in a review of a contemporary picture.
A bit more action and this could have been a John Wick-style winner because C.I.A. agent Dan Slater (Yul Brynner) is a big-time bad ass, all steely stare and resolve, and no time for anyone who gets in his way as he investigates the unexpected death of his son in the Austrian Alps.
It’s probably not this picture’s fault that any time a cable car hovers into view I expect to see Clint Eastwood or Richard Burton clambering atop all set to cause chaos, or any time a skier takes off down the slopes anticipate some James Bond malarkey. Luckily, director Franklin J. Schaffner (Planet of the Apes, 1968) avoids inviting comparison in those areas but rather too much reliance on the tourist elements of the ski world puffs out what would otherwise be a tighter storyline. And he also sets too much store by loud music to warn the audience of impending danger.
Slater is out of the ruthless espionage mold and, convinced on paltry evidence that his son has been murdered, determines to track down the perpetrators. There is a reversal of the usual plot in that those he asks for help are unwilling to give it, retired agent Frank Wheatly (Clive Revill) and chalet girl deluxe Gina (Britt Ekland) who initially views him as an older man to be fended off but turns out to have the vital information he seeks.
There’s a lot of tension but not much action and today’s modern vigilante would have beaten the information out of anybody who crossed his path rather than taking Slater’s rather docile approach. Despite this, the relentless tone set by Slater ensures violent explosion is imminent. To be sure, you will probably guess early on, from the appearance at the outset of some Russians, that Slater is heading into a trap, but the reasons are kept hidden long enough.
There are some excellent touches. Slater’s boss (Lloyd Nolan) has a nice line in keeping his office underling in check, chalet hostess (Moira Lister) is all style and snip, the Russian Col. Berthold (Anton Diffring) clipped and menacing. And the skiing sequences that relate to the picture are well done while the others are decently scenic.
It’s a shame that Yul Brynner (Villa Rides, 1968) is in brusque form for it gives Britt Ekland (Stiletto, 1969) in a switch from her comedy breakthroughs not enough to do. Brynner mines a good bit more emotion than is normally the case. Clive Revill is excellent as the former agent who has had his fill of espionage and dreads being pulled back into this murky world.
Producer Hal E. Chester clearly spent more on this than on The Comedy Man (1964) but with varying results, top-notch aerial photography but dodgy rear projection. And there are some screenwriting irregularities, such as why conduct the son’s funeral before the father is present. Frank Tarloff (Father Goose, 1964) and Alfred Hayes (Joy in the Morning, 1965) would be the ones to question on this issue since they wrote the screenplay based on the Henry Maxfield novel.
“I will never forget how casually Maria (Schneider of Last Tango in Paris fame) unbuttoned Joey’s shirt to hold her breast in one hand while eating a bagel with the other,” is just one of the memorable lines in director Ed Zwick’s (of Glory fame) memoir, a very candid portrait of working in Hollywood. Glamor and grit ride side by side as he goes from being a celebrity-struck newcomer to dragging tears out of Harvey Weinstein, hearing all about Julia Roberts’s love life, endless battles on set with Brad Pitt, being offered a beer by Paul Newman in the star’s house and digging into the untapped emotional reservoir of Tom Cruise.
His mentor, director Sydney Pollack, allowed Zwick to observe as he prepped Out of Africa (1985). Pollack had a complicated relationship with Robert Redford. The star “was infallibly late.” Opposite personalities. Pollack was “voluble, excitable and punctilious” while Redford was “taciturn, laconic and laid-back.” Dealing with a proper star can be disconcerting. Asked what it was like to direct Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born (1976), Frank Pierson said, “I wouldn’t know.”
Pollack offered Zwick sound advice about screenwriting. “Plot is the rotting meat the burglar throws to the dogs so he can climb over the fence and get the jewels, which are the characters.” Zwick’s first script, with writing partner Marshall Herskowitz, for Tri-Star, was a drama, Drawing Fire, about a Secret Service agent’s relationship with a corrupt cop. Dustin Hoffman wanted to play the lead. In conversation, Hoffman took “damn long to get to the point.” His involvement collapsed over his fee.
Jonathan Demme was originally slated for About Last Night (1986), an adaptation of David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago. When he pulled out, Zwick got the gig. If stars Rob Lowe and Demi Moore seemed very comfortable with the intimate scenes, that was because they had previously been an item. The movie did surprisingly well.
For a follow-up, Zwick passed on Thelma and Louise (1991) in favor of a different road picture, Leaving Normal (1992), originally set to star Cher and Holly Hunter. Jessica Lange entered the frame when Cher dropped out. After Hunter quit, Zwick signed up Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly. The picture bombed.
Next up was Shakespeare in Love with a script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard to star Julia Roberts who, as it happened, couldn’t help falling in love with her co-stars, that included by now Kiefer Sutherland, Dylan McDermott and Liam Neeson. To play William Shakespeare, she wanted Daniel Day-Lewis, sending him a card that said, “Be My Romeo,” but he was already committed to My Left Foot. Casting for her co-star was cancelled while she maintained that, actually, Day-Lewis had agreed. Only, when Zwick contacted him, that turned out to be fantasy.
With casting renewed, Zwick and Roberts saw, among others, Ralph Fiennes, Russell Crowe. Hugh Grant, Colin Firth and Sean Bean. But none clicked with the star, although oddly enough she later teamed with Grant in Notting Hill (1999). It could conceivably have gone ahead with Paul McGann. A full screen test was arranged. However, it was obvious at that point that Roberts hadn’t nailed her English accent. She quit, leaving Universal $6 million out of pocket.
The movie remained in cold storage for two years. Then Harvey Weinstein came calling. But not at the price Universal demanded. For the next few years, Zwick kept trying to interest actors with the requisite marquee heft such as Kenneth Branagh, Winona Ryder, Jude Law, even Mel Gibson and Johnny Depp. By coincidence, Ryder was best buds with Gwyneth Paltrow and showed her the script. Since Paltrow was Weinstein’s go-to actress, she convinced the producer to come back in. But the consequence of that was that Zwick was pushed out. Or so Weinstein believed, until he was sued. Which meant that when the movie was awarded Best Picture at the Oscars Zwick was on the stage.
Comments Zwick wryly, “ As I stand there…listening to Harvey’s prepared, saccharine, self-serving acceptance, it occurs to me to shove him over the edge of the stage into the orchestra pit. Faced with the choice of committing an act of violence before a worldwide audience of 100 million movie fans or false modesty, I make the wrong choice.”
Alvin Sargent (Paper Moon, 1973) signed up for a “hefty fee” to adapt Jim Harrison’s novella Legends of the Fall (1994). Not only was he “maddeningly slow” but after a year’s work he “hadn’t been able to figure out how to do it.” William D. Wittliff (Country, 1984) was next to take a crack before Zwick called on Marshall Hershowitz’s wife Susan Shilliday – who had been story consultant and story editor on Zwick’s television show thirtysomething – to do a rewrite. Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall were briefly interested. Brad Pitt rode to the rescue.
“It’s not enough,” muses Zwick, “that a movie star be handsome; good-looking actors are a dime a dozen. And it’s not just the way the light and shadow plays on someone’s bone structure. It’s the unmistakeable thing behind their eyes, suggesting a fascinating inner life. We don’t know what’s going on inside their heads, but we definitely want to and that’s enough.”
Pre-production Tri-Star got cold feet and demanded Zwick knock $2 million off the budget. Instead, the director and Pitt halved their fees in exchange for a bigger backend. Four weeks before shooting was due to commence, they were short of a female lead, though Paltrow, among others, had read for the part, ending up with relative newcomer Julia Ormond (The Baby of Macon, 1993). Days before shooting, Pitt quit. Or tried to. He could go as long as he paid all the costs of preparation. So Pitt remained. After two weeks of shooting, Zwick was $1 million over budget, largely due to costume issues.
“There are all sorts of reasons an actor will pick a fight,” notes Zwick, and he had more than his fair share of them with Pitt. Although the movie’s resultant commercial success doubled both their salaries, they didn’t talk for a year – and never worked together again.
Denzel Washington didn’t want to do Courage under Fire (1996) until Zwick introduced the idea of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a new idea at the time. Matt Damon really did almost fall out of a helicopter. As Washington and Damon did a scene together “it was as if a spell had been cast over the set,” all watching the birth of new screen great. Screen improvisation isn’t all about fashioning new lines. It’s about an actor finding “emotion in an authentic way.” For the scene where Washington returns home, Zwick placed a bike along the walkway. Washington’s reaction to this unexpected obstacle was to pick it up and set it upright.
Tom Cruise originally passed on the John Logan script for The Last Samurai (2003) that Zwick felt was “still uncooked.” Uncooked or not, Russell Crowe, incidentally, was interested in the Japanese lead. Zwick did a rewrite. Cruise liked the rewrite. “What struck me most as I got to know him was his insatiable appetite to keep improving.” Cruise was one of the actors whose involvement was an automatic green light for a studio. After completing another draft with Hershowitz, Zwick got a call to go see Robert Towne (Chinatown, 1973). He went in dread. Towne “had an informal arrangement with Tom whereby he sometimes quietly rewrote his movies.” Instead of confrontation, Towne was encouraging. “Apparently, he just wanted to take my measure.”
There’s an animatronic horse – costing a million bucks – that appears for a few seconds in The Last Samurai in order for it to appear to the audience that in fact a horse was falling on Tom Cruise for a scene that would not have been possible, in the days before CGI, just with a stuntman. Zwick’s biggest problem on the picture was how to puncture Cruise’s self-assurance, get him to the “right emotional place…to touch some vulnerable part in him.” Zwick realized that simply asking the actor to go deeper wouldn’t work. It would look forced.
So just before shooting the critical scene, Zwick asked Cruise about his eight-year-old son, Connor. “I watched as he looked inward, and a window seemed to open and his eyes softened.” Zwick gently nudged him into position. “Go.”
Movie fans often wonder how a director gets into the movies. Usually, each tale is as odd as the last, a lucky break, meeting the right studio executive at the right time, coming across a studio hungry for your type of picture just at the ideal moment. Zwick has an odd an introduction. Living in Paris on a fellowship to observe experimental theater, he managed to creep onto the set of Love and Death (1975) and pepper Woody Allen with questions and he had a sneak preview of the Annie Hall (1977) script.
On returning to the U.S., he was accepted onto the American Film Institute’s director program. There were 26 pupils in the class, Zwick was one of six invited back for a second year. There, he struck up a lifelong friendship with Marshall Hershowitz. While studying, he read 10 scripts a week for United Artists, fell in with a merry band of more experienced Hollywood hands including Paul Schrader, Michael and Julia Phillips and Oliver Stone. After an improbable series of coincidences, he got was employed as story editor for the tv series Family (1976-1980). Still aiming for a movie slot, he watched in horror as David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, 1981) lasted for only six minutes of a private screening of Zwick’s 30-minute student film.
There’s not one of Zwick’s movies where he doesn’t regale you with an interesting anecdote about a star. More importantly, he provides insights into how movies are made, often touching on details that would not be obvious to anyone outside the business.
Ed Zwick, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions, My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood (Gallery Books) is available in print and kindle.
Want to hire Matthew Broderick? Then you better be prepared for his mother. Worse, there was no get-out clause. Tri-Star Pictures, an offshoot of Columbia, was only making the movie because of Broderick, whose marquee value was based solely on a completely different type of picture, namely Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Yes, he had won a Tony aged 21, and this was his sixth picture, of which only War Games (1983) hit the box office mark.
But the actor had a great deal to contend with in his personal life, grief and guilt as a result of driving his car into the wrong lane, crashing into an oncoming vehicle, killing two and seriously injuring himself and his passenger Jennifer Grey. His mother had been seriously ill, also. Glory proved another ordeal. “Nothing I might have done could possibly rival Matthew’s role in the theater of cruelty that was about to begin,” wrote director Ed Zwick in his memoir, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions (2024).
The same accusation of being a lightweight could as easily been levelled at Zwick, his only movie being About Last Night (1986), which though with serious undertones, was basically a modernized rom-com. He was best known for television, as writer-producer on thirtysomething (1987-1991), that “despite its success was an intimate, whiny talkfest.”
Broderick’s mother, Patsy, made her presence felt almost immediately. Before shooting commenced, the actor quit. Patsy didn’t like the script. By this point, Zwick hadn’t even met Broderick. Zwick received the news while on holiday in a cabin in the mountains. Communication was primitive, virtually walkie-talkie style. Eventually, Zwick agreed to look at the actor’s notes on the screenplay.
The script issues should have warned Zwick what he was taking on. At that time the film was called Lay This Laurel, the title of a monograph by Lincoln Kirstein, about the assault on Morris Island by the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the project initially on the slate of Bruce Beresford, Oscar nominated director of Tender Mercies (1983). Kevin Jarre, with just a ‘story by’ screen credit, for Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), to his name, had written the screenplay. “The script is perfect,” averred Jarre when Zwick demanded a rewrite. Beyond a slight polish and a shifting around of some scenes, Jarre wouldn’t budge. So Zwick took on the rewrite.
Broderick’s notes were within the realm of expectation, mostly to do with his character. But then he sent the script to Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird, 1962), whose daughter he was dating. Then to Bo Goldman (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1975). Neither writer took on the script and Goldman assured Zwick the script was fine. Then, the final bombshell. At her son’s insistence, Patsy was to work on the script. “I’m sure she was capable of warmth,” noted Zwick, “but I was never treated to that side of her, from the moment we met,” going through the script page by page, “she was contemptuous, demeaning and volatile,” her son sitting in silence. Amendments suggested by Patsy were readings from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a scene where Broderick’s character was persuaded to take command of the regiment by his screen mother, to be played by his real mother.
As it happened, long before Broderick turned up, Zwick had been shooting footage from the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg where 20,000 men in full uniform and weapons re-enacted the conflict. On a $25,000 budget, Zwick shot 30,000 feet including a cavalry charge, and created what was known in Hollywood parlance as a “sizzle reel.” Many of the re-enactors turned up as extras.
Cary Elwes (The Princess Bride, 1987) took a salary cut for his role. Zwick had been impressed by Denzel Washington in A Soldier’s Story (1984) and Cry Freedom (1987) but couldn’t afford him until producer Freddie Fields chipped in some of his fee. Morgan Freeman’s career was on an upward turn after an Oscar nomination for Street Smart (1987). Zwick found acting chemistry between this pair and Jihmi Kennedy and Andre Braugher. The actors “were hearing music I couldn’t even imagine,” wrote Zwick, “yet during each session, a transcendent moment, usually unwritten, could occur.”
Initially, however, Zwick felt he was making a disaster, “the lighting was too bright, the costumes were too new, and Matthew (Broderick) seemed uncomfortable in his role.” Luckily, a storm intervened. Not to provide rest or for Zwick to regroup. A mere storm wasn’t sufficient cause to postpone the scene of the regiment’s arrival in Readville. In the attendant fog, they were bedraggled, ankle-deep in mud, shoulders hunched against the lashing rain. Zwick realized that was the look he was after. He approached cinematographer Freddie Francis to shoot “without lights” in order to capture a similar mood. “Why didn’t you say so, dear boy?” was Francis’s encouraging response.
The next day, the first tent scene, provided another surprise. “I stared open-mouthed at the utter transformation that had taken place. Overnight he (Denzel Washington) has become Trip. Volatile. Funny. Mesmeric…it was impossible to take your eyes off Denzel…I had been in the presence of greatness. I’d never seen an actor command the focus by doing so little.”
Andre Braugher, in his debut, was also a revelation, after he’d mastered the art of hitting his marks. Once, during rehearsal for a scene, Zwick noticed that Morgan Freeman never looked Broderick in the eye. “Just as I was just about to move the camera to catch his look, I realized he was making a point of not looking at him…as a black man who had lived a lifetime wary of being punished.” Despite the traumas over the script, Broderick’s performance was “pitch perfect.”
The most emotionally powerful scene is the whipping. Twice, Zwick filmed Washington receiving three lashes. “But there was something more to be mined.” Making an excuse, Zwick asked Washington to re-do the scene, but then told John Finn, applying the whip, not to stop until Zwick called “cut.” Finn had delivered eight strokes before Zwick found what he was looking for. “The shame and mortification were real now… and in the magic of movies…a single tear appeared, catching the light at the perfect moment.”
Directorial sleight of hand in the battle scene compensated for limited budget and insufficient extras. Taking note of Kurosawa’s Ran (1985), Zwick filmed one “big image of each significant moment of the battle using the entire contingent.” The trick was to go back and shoot it all over again with a smaller group but each time filling the frame top to bottom with soldiers fighting. “When it’s cut together, the larger image stays in the audience’s mind as long as they’re never allowed to see blank space at the peripheries of the frame.”
To add to the battle, they let loose rockets and explosions on the night sky, almost losing a $300,000 camera car in the process. Much of the exposition, including the Patsy Broderick scenes, ended up on the cutting room floor. While Kevin Jarre had become a “cheerleader” for the film, Broderick and his mother walked out of a preview with the actor demanding to do his own cut of the movie. Zwick refused.
Released in December 1985, Glory was nominated for four Oscars including best director. Washington won Best Supporting Actor, Freddie Francis for Cinematography and Donald O. Mitchell, Greg Rudloff, Elliot Tyson and Russell Williams II for sound. Tri-Star refused to advertize in Black media. Zwick considered any “pushback” of Broderick’s character being perceived as a “white-savior narrative” as a “left-wing canard.”
SOURCE: Ed Zwick, Hits, Flops and Other Illusions, My Fortysomething Years inHollywood (Gallery Books) 2024, pp69-105.
The mania for anniversary reissue seems to have passed this one by and, in the light of other campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, seems odd that nobody could take advantage of the 35th anni opportunity, not least Columbia, on a revival bandwagon, under whose aegis it was made. Equally, nor does it appear to have struck a chord among those studio executives keen on remakes.
Certainly, if re-done it would rectify the nagging flaw of a picture about the black experience viewed primarily through the white prism. The passing of years would have made Denzel Washington ideal for the part of the older man while his son John David Washington might have collected sufficient marquee approval to qualify for the showier part of the younger man. Remade from the perspective of the freed black slaves, with the white contingent as subsidiary, surely it would carry even more power than the original especially over the issues raised, not just slavery but, as important, the institutional racism that saw the black man, even when freed, as inferior.
The initial crux of this tale of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment formed in the American Civil War comprising freed slaves was that it was originally little more than a PR exercise, the black soldiers kept destitute of footwear, uniforms and weaponry on the assumption that they would make poor soldiers. The other important factor was whether freedom would make any difference post-war if the black soldiers, having risked their lives, did not return to an improved situation in society.
This isn’t the kind of army picture where the raw recruits come to greatly admire, however grudgingly, their superiors along the lines of Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and The Dirty Dozen (1967). It is much more complex than that. The white man (in this case Matthew Broderick) remains top-billed over Denzel Washington (then a rising star) and Morgan Freeman (whose career zoomed thereafter). And promotion, as with every Army of the period, was synonymous with wealth and/or status.
So relatively inexperienced Capt. Shaw (Matthew Broderick) is promoted to Colonel and given command of the black regiment, aided by the more obviously self-serving Major Forbes (Cary Elwes). Much of the early sections revolve around Shaw establishing his credentials, stamping his authority on his own officers, in particular Forbes who treats him as a buddy rather than a superior, and later having the confidence to challenge (and blackmail) the corrupt vested interests denying his troops the equipment they need and insisting they receive the same wage as their white compatriots.
Tucked in around that narrative are the freed slaves, the younger Pvt Trip (Denzel Washington), who refuses to kowtow and rejects the offer of carrying the regimental flag into battle, and the older grizzled Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) who is promoted to Sgt Major, gaining respect and revelling, eventually, in his authority. But there’s also the already free Searles (Andre Braugher), educated and literate, who joins up out of solidarity only to discover he has little aptitude for soldiering and no amount of appeal to former pal Shaw can spare him from the attentions of the brutal white Sgt Maj Mulcahy.
The training stretches Shaw’s innate benevolence to the extreme, having experienced battle himself, aware of how tough his men need to become to endure warfare.
The battle scenes are tremendous, the scenes of desperate hand-to-hand fighting, the slaughter from cannons and serried musketry, highlighting the courage it takes to stand and not turn and run. The first battle brings victory but the second is infinitely more dangerous, an assault doomed to result in mass casualties and little glory.
Although Matthew Broderick is certainly overshadowed by Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, I don’t fall into the camp that’s critical of his performance. In a sense it’s obvious he’s trying to shy away from the bravado exuded in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) but my guess is that his character’s diffidence, fear of command, awareness that he lacks the personal authority were true of a man raised way above his station for all the wrong reasons. Denzel Washington (Cry Freedom, 1987) won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but, surprisingly, Morgan Freeman wasn’t nominated.
Director Ed Zwick (About Last Night, 1986) had to content himself with a Golden Globe nomination, though he’d reunite with Washington twice more and his handling of the battle scenes was recommendation enough for later big-budget pictures like The Last Samurai (2003). Screenplay by Kevin Jarre (Tombstone, 1993).
Very stylish caper picture that dispenses with the recruitment section, the ingenious hi-tech robbery accounting for the first half, escape and double-cross the second, a slinky Rosanna Podesta an added attraction/distraction. The Professor (Phillippe Leroy), in bowler hat and umbrella, orchestrates the gold bullion theft from an uber-secure bank using hidden microphones and cameras and a host of electronic equipment, the inch-perfect heist organized to mathematical perfection and timed to the second.
His team, disguised as manual workers, dig under the road, don scuba gear to negotiate a sewer, drill up into the gigantic vault and then suck out the gold bars using travelators and hoists. Giorgia (Podesta), sometimes wearing cat-shaped spectacles, a body stocking and other times not very much, causes the necessary diversions and plants a homing device in a safety deposit box adjacent to the vault. Occasionally her attractiveness causes problems, priests in the neighboring block complaining she is putting too much on show.
It’s not all plain sailing. A cop complains about the workmen working during the sacrosanct siesta, a bureaucrat insists on paperwork, a radio ham picks up communication suggesting a robbery in progress, the police appear on the point of sabotaging the plan.
But the whole thing is brilliantly done, the calm professor congratulating himself on his brilliance, Giorgia seduction on legs. The getaway is superbly handled, the loot smuggled out in exemplary fashion, its destination designed to confuse. Then it is double-cross, triple-cross and whatever-cross comes after that, with every reversal no idea what is going to happen next. It is twist after twist after twist. Some of the criminals are slick and some are dumb. As well as the high drama there are moments of exquisite comedy.
Italian writer-director Mario Vicario (The Naked Hours, 1964) handles this European co-production with considerable verve and although, minus the normal recruitment section, we don’t get to know the team very well except for the professor and Giorgia, each is still given some little identity marker and in any case by the time they come to split the proceeds we are already hooked.
Frenchman Phillippe Leroy (Castle of the Living Dead, 1964) is the standout as a mastermind in the British mold, stickler for accuracy, calm under pressure, working with military precision. Podesta (also The Naked Hours) has no problem catching the camera’s attention or playing with the emotions of the gang to fulfill her own agenda. The gang is multi-national – German, French, Italian, Spanish Portuguese, Irish – with only Gabriel Tinti likely to be recognized by modern audiences.
And there is a terrific score by Armando Trovajoli (Marriage Italian Style, 1964) that changes mood instantly scene by scene. One minute it is hip and cool jazz, the next jaunty, and then tense.
Touching low-budget B-movie shot in black-and-white of a young man receiving his sexual education from an older woman. Motherless Vito (Scott Maxwell), the son of an apartment block super, is seduced by the older Iris (Lola Albright), three-time divorcee, looking for a son to mother.
This is not the transactional sex of The Graduate, and seduction is too strong a description for the yearning Iris whose advances are sensual and romantic, stroking Vito’s head, trapping his hand with her foot, and there is nothing clandestine about their affair either, no false names on a hotel register. They dally in the park, eat hotdogs, and he buys her flowers.
But as he experiences love for the first time, he also experiences more difficult emotions like jealousy and finds it difficult not just to cope with what seems like another man in her life, the wholesaler Juley (Herschel Bernardi), but the fact that she treats him with such contempt. Spoiler alert – well, not really, because you know from the off this is not going to turn out well – the affair ends when he discovers she is a stripper. And while she is left bereft, he now appears more attractive to girls his own age.
In contrast to the powerful emotions stoked up when the pair are together, director Alexander Singer (Psyche ‘59) fills us in on the rest of Vito’s humdrum life, working for his father during the school holidays, goofing off with his pals, and generally failing to make headway with girls his own age. But Iris’s life is not humdrum. Although she has a rule not to work in her own area, she breaks that to accommodate her estranged husband, whom she seems to tolerate, while at the same time drinking herself into oblivion to avoid any moves from Juley. Nor is she ashamed of her profession. It is an act, a job like any other, and provides her with a nice apartment.
Small wonder she treats men with contempt. Perhaps what she falls in love with is untainted innocence. In some senses she is adrift, at other times in full command. And her love for Vito is convincing.
It is full of incidentals. He gulps down ice-cream, she teaches him to drink one sip at a time, without being patronizing the father (Joe De Santis) tries to educate him to honor his inner feelings.
Lola Albright (Peter Gunn television series) carries off a difficult role very well indeed. Without laughs to help him out as it did Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Scott Maxwell is believable both as the youth growing into adulthood and the youth wanting to remain a youth with no adult responsibilities. The low-key performance of Joe De Santis is worth a mention.
While the picture no doubt attracted attention for the risqué material, which would have certainly given the Production Code pause for thoughts, it provided a more rounded picture than was normal at the time of a woman working in the sex industry, even if only in the stripping department. Iris did not fall into any of the cliches. She is presented as a woman first and foremost rather than a stripper.
Alexander Singer sticks to the knitting and doesn’t come unstuck. John Hayes (Shell Shock, 1964) wrote the screenplay based on the Burton Wohl bestseller.
If “I see dead people” isn’t one of the greatest lines ever written, I don’t know what is. Apart from anything else it highlights the screenwriting element of director M. Night Shyamalan’s talent. Had the little boy, in whatever haunted manner, simply said, “I see ghosts,” it wouldn’t at all have had the same impact. And reinventing this genre took a lot more than knitting together a few scary moments.
The horror genre had morphed into scaring the pants off women, their screams the soundtrack of the decade, and, of course, it was often the last sound they made as slicing-and-dicing became the norm and body counts multiplied. Nobody dies here. And the dead aren’t zombies either. Little Cole (Haley Joel Osment) almost acts as a psychiatrist, putting ghosts back together, listening to their woes, letting them come to terms with death. I won’t spoil the ending for you in case you haven’t seen it because when it first came out every audience member was urged not to reveal the ending.
What Shyamalan has done is give the ghost story narrative purpose, two characters who need each other, guilt-ridden psychiatrist Malcolm (Bruce Willis), marriage in trouble, suspecting wife Anna (Olivia Williams) of having an affair, finds himself getting unspoken guidance from the kid he is meant to be giving advice to. Cole is bullied at school, treated as a freak, having to conceal his own torment from everyone, and teachers who should recognize signs of disturbance instead resort to punishment. Kids lock him in a cupboard and single mother Lynn (Toni Collette) is at her wit’s end.
The great screenwriters invent scenes nobody’s ever thought about before. Trying to elicit information from Cole, Malcolms plays a game. If he is correct in an assumption, the child takes one step forward. A few correct answers and he’ll be plonked down in a chair opposite the psychiatrist. But if the answers are wrong, Cole takes a step backward. It’s an incredibly clever conceit, exposition disguised as a game. By the end of it, Cole is back where he started, and the boy’s ostensible savior is revealed as a failure.
These are two tormented souls coming together and for the most part it plays almost with an arthouse sensibility to a kid growing up, making his way in the adult world, except as much as Cole is developing, so is Malcolm, his life foundering, walking around in permanent lament for a world that’s gone wrong, somehow slipped away from his grasp from a time he was physically adored and professionally acclaimed.
It’s the psychiatrist’s burden to occasionally fail. Sometimes the consequences are unendurable even if the client was beyond repair and Malcolm puts his current depression, forgetting his anniversary, for example, down to one terrible failure. Cole isn’t entirely defenceless. He can spot adult weakness, and feeling threatened, humiliates his teacher with with vicious aggression that exposes a childhood disability that appears on the face of it successfully overcome but, in reality, still lurking.
Gradually, Cole grows in confidence, matures, is given the leading part in the school play, accepted, and Malcolm can take pride in his accomplishment. Shyamalan is too clever a screenwriter to have the child identify point blank the adult’s problems. The revelation is a moment of stunning self-clarity.
But I promised not to say any more.
Instead, I’ll talk about Shyamalan’s directorial skill, in particular his use of the fade, a little-used technical device from back in the day. Most directors simply employ the cut. Everything is connected, let’s move on, keep this narrative going. The fade is like the end of a chapter, time to turn a page, a sigh, every section allowed time to breathe, before we move on.
We might also credit Shyamalan with bringing out two superb performances from the leads. He wipes that trademark smirk off Bruce Willis’s face, finds ways of making the screen’s biggest tough guy come off as weak. Haley Joel Osment was a tad older than the character he plays, but still no more than ten, I guess, at the time of filming. To carry off such long speeches with such authenticity would be beyond most child actors, who usually come to the fore in some inconsequential froth, rather than a serious drama, was jaw-dropping. Amazing he didn’t win the Oscar or be given a special one. Because it’s a very special performance and without such singular acting the movie wouldn’t have worked at all.
Shyamalan’s been around longer than Christopher Nolan but with none of the comparable accolade. Apart from an occasional foray into sci-fi, he’s stuck, like Hitchcock, to the thriller genre. He followed The Sixth Sense with, in my opinion, his masterpiece, Unbreakable (2000) and had another big hit with Signs (2002) but thereafter his box office wavered and though consistently churning out a movie every two years ended up at the lower-budget end of Hollywood. His new one Trap, due out later this month, is distributed by a major studio, Warner Bros, so if it succeeds, and it’s getting great buzz, he might be welcomed back into the fold.
I was able to see The Sixth Sense on the big screen again not because someone was attributing retrospective glory to Shyamalan but because a marketing whiz has come up with the great publicity wheeze of tying up a package of pictures from the same year by different studios and chucking them out under the anniversary aegis (25th in case you can’t do the maths) so tapping into nostalgia. As with the current reissue formula, these pictures are restricted to one showing on one day and to my surprise when I saw this, I would reckon the theater was three-quarters full and as much with youngsters as older people.
So while you’ve already missed it on the big screen, I’m sure it’s available on DVD or streaming.
Count me in. The buddy movie reinvented, the MCU legend trashed, all set in the ideal MCU location, The Void (worthy of two capital letters, I guess), the place where long-forgetten Marvel characters from the pre-Disney multiverse hang out, and it’s a fun ride. Whether of course this proves the death knell for the MCU after so much fan backlash and poor reviews remains to be seen. Next weekend’s box office will decide its fate one way or another.
But who the hell cares? If this is the extinction of the MCU, as some predict, then it is going out with a bang, a crazy superhero mash-up where you need to keep an MCU dictionary to hand so you can work who’s going to turn up next. Wesley Snipes, not seen in that Blade badass rig since 2004, and it’s not Capt America but Chris Evans’ earlier incarnation of Johnny Storm not seen since 2007, and there’s Channing Tatum as a character Gambit whose stand-alone picture never materialized, despite scoring highly in animated form.
Well hello again.
Anything that MCU got wrong or was criticized for – the multiverse and the varying timelines – turn up here as plot. The “sacred time lime” is almost a character in itself and if you ever wanted to invent the most ideal/ironic MCU character, who else would that be but Mr Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen)?
The entire storyline is so off-the-wall that you’d think it’s never going to work but then when Deadpool’s around walls are toys, especially the fourth wall, that magical trick of speaking direct to the camera. And it’s Deadpool and his continual wisecrack commentary on proceedings that turns what could be a s**tshow into a hoot.
But some of the twists transform what could be another deathly routine of superheroes saving the universe (yawn, what again?) into something more human. Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) only wants to save his own tiny universe of half a dozen people, everyone who matters to him, and not a gazillion others. Somehow he teams up with the previously deceased Logan a.k.a. (in case you don’t have your MCU Dictionary handy) Wolverine to revive the moribund buddy movie, the best kickass bickering pair since Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon.
Or whatever. Anyway, they find themselves in The Void doing battle with that sweet Charles Xavier guy’s nasty twin sister Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin). And, yes, there’s still so much jiggering about with time that you’d think the Time Bandits or Doctor Who would be claiming copyright infringement. And sometimes you can almost hear the clack of the typewriter as the screenwriter tries to fix that last loose end.
But, as I said, whenever the going gets tough – especially when the going gets tough – you can depend on Deadpool’s motormouth to see the narrative through. Deadpool and Wolverine do make a great screen team, ideal opposites, growl vs grit, class vs. sass, and really you could just junk the narrative – or come up with an entirely different one – and still this picture would work because the two principles set the screen alight.
This is akin to when Guardians of the Galaxy ripped up the MCU playbook a decade ago and influenced every movie thereafter. The guess now is whether Deadpool and Wolverine will take MCU down a new stylistic avenue or whether this is a deliberate cul de sac. I’d guess not, since it’s going to be such a money-spinner, and I could see this pair worming their way into the new Avengers team to brighten up whatever doom-laden occasion is heading our way.
Maybe the MCU is giving the finger to the fanboys, hoping to attract a wider audience rather than pandering to an audience that seemed to have made up its mind about everything way in advance and wasn’t inclined to go along with any MCU experiment, feint or development. The audience I saw it with were clearly of mixed opinion, some feeling betrayed or at the very least insulted.
But I have a good bit less invested in the MCU. It takes me all my time to keep up with who’s who in this expanding universe. So treating this picture on its own merits, I thought it generated more than its fair share of laughs, and not always rude ones, although anyone with a woke inclination would be advised to steer clear.
Commonwealth United, the makers of A Black Veil for Lisa (1968) reviewed yesterday, was one of a flood of new entrants to the movie business in the middle to late 1960s. Variety, which always liked to put an easy label on things, tabbed them “mini-majors,” “near majors” or “instant majors” in the belief that any outfit that could string together a substantial annual output was worthy of being considered a contender to become a major player in the great movie game.
A caste system had operated in Hollywood since the 1930s. The “Little Three” of United Artists, Universal and Columbia were considered inferior to the likes of the “Big Five” of MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, RKO and Warner Bros. By the 1960s the smaller units had been promoted and Disney had taken the place of RKO. But with product at an all-time low, the U.S. Government was inclined to rethink its stance on monopoly and permit cinema chains to enter the business – the Paramount Decree of 1948 having expressly forbidden the opposite, of studios owning cinema circuits.
National General was the first to challenge the government dictat. The Government in the 1940s had prevented Hollywood studios from becoming involved in television but now did something of a U-turn in permitting television giants ABC and CBS to invest in movies made under the aegis of ABC-Cinerama and Cinema Center, respectively. More legitimate operations, by original Government standards, were the likes of Commonwealth United, American International (AIP), Embassy Pictures, and smaller units like Sigma 3 (in which producer Marty Ransohoff had a stake), Independent-International, Continental (backed by the Walter Reade arthouse chain) and Cinema 5.
The mini-majors could make movies much faster than the established studios which had millions of bucks tied up in projects, books and plays, paid for and never made, deals with talent that didn’t work out, as well as bigger overheads and interest on loans running at $2 million a year per studio. For a short period the newcomers did well in the box office sweepstakes, in 1970, for example, Cinema Center beat Warner Bros in market share. And with the product well running dry and big studios being more selective about release dates, that still left considerable “playing time unused by big companies” that could be filled by “low-voltage commercial product.”
I’ve covered the National General tale before so suffice to say it did most of the heavy lifting in challenging the Paramount Decree and made such pictures as The Stalking Moon (1968) with Gregory Peck and Eva Marie Saint, Elvis in Charro! (1969), El Condor (1970), and James Stewart and Henry Fonda in The Cheyenne Social Club (1970) and was influential in the distribution of films made by other mini-majors.
Commonwealth United began as a real estate company formed in 1961 that took over the Landau-Unger movie production company in 1967 and began the serious business of creating a large enough movie roster that would make it welcome to the distributor. In these product-famine times, anybody who could produce a movie could get a distributor, but the terms of the deal, if you were a one-off, favored the distributor. To achieve any kind of box office parity, you needed to show substantial intended output. Its initial entry into the business was as a distributor, in 1968 handling the U.S. release of spy thriller Subterfuge (1968) with Gene Barry, jungle picture Eve (1968), The Angry Breed (1968) mixing bikers and the movies, and heist picture Dayton’s Devils (1968), before biting the bullet with Italian-made A Black Veil for Lisa with British star John Mills top-billed.
Commonwealth United couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to go down the A-movie or B-movie route. Its follow-ups to A Black Veil for Lisa were women-in-prison epic 99 Women (1969) and erotic thriller Venus in Furs (1969). But when it headed into the mainstream, it hit a box office barrier. Yugoslavian epic The Battle of Neretva (1969) with Yul Brynner flopped. Peter Sellers and Raquel Welch – snookered into fronting its lavish brochure, see photo above – couldn’t save The Magic Christian (1969). Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park (1969) with Sandy Dennis, Julius Caesar (1970) starring Charlton Heston and The Ballad of Tam Lin (1970) with Ava Gardener all went down the tubes. The company closed down in 1971.
The bigger hitters, at least initially, promised more. Cinema Center, set up in 1967 using National General for distribution, and headed up by ex-Fox chief Gordon T. Stulberg, snagged deals with the likes of Doris Day, Jack Lemmon and Steve McQueen. Launch item With Six You Get Eggroll (1968) starring Day and Brian Keith was followed by some potential box office bonanzas – The Reivers (1969) and Le Mans (1971) with McQueen, John Wayne in Rio Lobo (1970) directed by Howard Hawks and Big Jake (1971), Richard Harris as A Man Called Horse (1970), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) with Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway, William Holden in The Revengers (1971) and Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman in Prime Cut (1971).
But there was a high end price to pay. As with United Artists in the 1950s, Carolco in the 1980s and streamers today, big stars and directors took advantage of ambitious smaller companies. The price of even playing the game was high. Sure, there was reward. Little Big Man took in $15 million in rentals, The Reivers $8 million, Big Jake $7.5 million, A Man Called Horse $6 million. But that couldn’t stop the flow of red ink on calamities like early Michael Douglas vehicle Hail Hero (1969), Rod Taylor as a private eye in Darker than Amber (1970), Who Is Harry Kellerman (1971), Joseph Losey’s existential thriller Figures in a Landscape (1971) and a over a dozen more. Twenty out of 27 movies made a loss, the cumulative total running at £30 million. By 1972 CBS had had enough and closed shop.
ABC released its pictures through an offshoot of Cinerama called Cinerama Releasing Corporation. It, too, struck occasional gold. Charly (1968) won an unexpected Oscar for Cliff Robertson. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) did the same for Gig Young and helped Jane Fonda be recognized as a serious actress. And big names signed on: Ingmar Bergman for The Touch (1971), Sam Peckinpah and Dustin Hoffman for Straw Dogs (1971). Robert Aldrich made three – The Killing of Sister George (1969), Too Late the Hero (1970) and The Grissom Gang (1971). With its biggest hit They Shoot Horses only picking up $5.5 million in U.S. rentals and For Love of Ivy (1968) with Sidney Poitier $5 million and the bulk of the others striking out, ABC pulled out of the movie business in 1971.
Cinema owner-turned-distributor Joe Levine had been a thorn in the side of Hollywood for many years especially after his imported Hercules (1958) showed you could sell anything to the American public if you put enough advertising dough behind it – a notion he signally undercut when all the money in the world couldn’t turn Jack the Ripper (1959) into a hit. He turned more legit, in Hollywood eyes at least, by teaming up with Paramount for The Carpetbaggers (1964) and Nevada Smith (1966) and funded Zulu (1964) – a hit most places except the U.S. After the critical and financial success of The Graduate (1968) and The Lion in Winter (1968) he sold Embassy to one of those conglomerates that had started sniffing around the business, Textron, and the company was renamed Avco Embassy. Kept on as president, he quit in 1974 and Avco Embassy pulled out of movies a year later only to re-enter the fold in 1977 and under Robert Rehme shift into lower-budgeted numbers like The Fog (1980) and Time Bandits (1981). He increased turnover fourfold. In later years, the company changed owners and names several times.
Some of the less well-publicized orgaizations lasted longer. Independent-International, set up by Sam Sherman, Dan Kennis and Al Adamson in 1968, kept budgets down to an average $200,000 a picture and reckoned that even with limited opportunity could pull in rentals of $300,000. After the success of biker picture Satan’s Sadists (1968), the company put 13 movies in circulation without troubling the New York first runs. Typically, a movie would garner 4,000-6,000 playdates. That company is still in existence.
Going back to where we started with Commonwealth United, you’re probably very familiar with American International for its Edgar Allan Poe, beach party and biker pictures. But in 1969 after co-founder James Nicholson quit and the company went public with the aim of entering the Hollywood mainstream, it relied on Commonwealth for distribution, releasing 31 pictures in this fashion. Beginning with adaptations of classics like Wuthering Heights (1971) and Kidnapped (1971) and moving onto big-budgeters like Force 10 from Navarone (1978) and still dipping into horror and exploitation AIP coninued in one guise or another until 1980.
SOURCES: “Nat Gen Readying 7th Film,” Variety, November 16, 1966, p4; “Instant Majors: A Short Cut,” Variety, October 25, 1967, p5; “Same Upper Uppers,” Variety, October 30, 1968, p12; “Commonwealth: Near Major,” Variety, February 19, 1969, p5; “Commonwealth Full Sell,” Variety, May 7, 1969, p7; “Nat Gen Rolling Six,” Variety, October 8, 1969, p6; “Topheavy Film Studios Fade,” Variety, October 29, 1969, p1; “Nat Gen Denies Phase-Out,” Variety, August 12, 1970, p5; “1970 Domestic Theaters Sweepstakes,” Variety, January 13, 1971, p38; “Today’s Majors As Instant,” Variety, July 21, 1971, p7; “American Int Expected Inheritor of Cinerama Releasing,” Variety, July 31, 1974, p3.
John Mills ventures back into Tunes of Glory (1960) territory as a top official coming apart at the seams. This time it’s not the British Army but the Italian Police where, as Franz Buloff, he heads up the narcotics squad. And this time he’s not the complacent victim but decides to take action against his tormentor.
Closing in on drugs kingpin Scheurermann, he finds that one witness after another is being silenced by an assassin with a deadly knife. He suspects a leak in his department, unaware the traitor is much closer to home. And despite the usual dissatisfied boss Ostermeyer (Tillio Altamura) breathing down his neck, he would be making more headway if it wasn’t for the fact that his head is constantly filled with images of his wife Lisa making love to another man.
For her part, Lisa seems determined to unhinge her husband, eliciting jealousy at every turn, by never answering the phone at night and always an excuse, when he tracks her down, for not being where was supposed to be. Rather than calming him down, her occasional seduction of her husband only serves to ramp up his fury.
In any case, it’s an odd set-up, he’s much older and the security he offers is not just financial. She was once a suspect herself and being married to a top cop has put a force field between her and suspicion. There’s clearly an unspoken assertion that somehow she has duped the cop, making him fall in love with an apparently innocent woman. They couldn’t be more opposite. “I like danger,” is her mantra.
He breaks open the case after following up a clue dropped at the scene of the crime. After arresting Max (Robert Hoffman), he strikes a deal with the killer. In return for his freedom, the murderer has to take out Lisa. But, of course, it’s not as simple as that. When Buloff realizes the deep water he is treading, he calls off the assassination. But then when he discovers that Max has helped himself to a bonus – beginning an affair with Lisa – he recants and puts the man back on the spot.
So, now, it’s Max who faces the quandary of having to kill his lover. And that puts up square in cat-and-mouse territory.
This isn’t quite giallo, the genre was still in the process of being born, in part because there’s no mystery about the killer, in part because the murders aren’t bloody enough, and in part because the dead aren’t sexy young women. So it’s more a series of character studies, each driven to an edge by an action that otherwise would be out of character.
A top cop like Buloff should have been a better judge of character than to fall for Lisa’s wiles in the first place. Lisa, too, should have recognized her penchant for the seedier side of life rather than being as she puts it “too young to be buried alive” in a stifling marriage to a jealous husband. But, she, too, is a poor judge of character, expecting to win back the favor of the drug overlord after she had so openly crossed the tracks to the other side of the law.
And Max, one of the first of a series of killers in movies who wanted out (see The Brotherhood, 1968, and Stiletto, 1969), is trapped into more killing because nowhere is safe. Getting rid of Buloff was never in his plans, as that would draw even more unwelcome attention. But then neither was falling in love with the cop’s wife. There’s still a few twists to go not least when Lisa discovers that the husband she felt she had under control had broken free and was intending to have her killed.
John Mills, a surprising addition to the Brits heading for Italy, is excellent especially as the big flaw in Tunes of Glory was his inability to find the cunning to strike back at his chief tormentor. Here, he might have second thoughts about dispatching his wife, but revenge is always the best weapon.
Luciana Paluzzi (Chuka, 1967, which, incidentally, also featured Mills) gets her teeth into a decent role rather than been saddled in lightweight fare since swanning around in swimwear in Thunderball (1965). Austrian Robert Hoffman (Assignment K, 1968) is given a surprising range of emotions to deal with.
Massimo Dallamano (Venus in Furs, 1969) handles the material well and gets the best out of his cast without taking the bloodier route of the later giallo. He was one of four writers contributing to the screenplay. This was one of the feature films made by new American mini-major Commonwealth United, one of the stack of “instant majors” popping up around this time.
John Mills is always watchable and the twists make this one play.
The Magnificent 60s 